It is lunchtime in Jaunapur, a quiet district to the southwest of Delhi where
William Dalrymple lives with his wife, Olivia, and their three children in a
large modern house surrounded by three acres of greenery. We are sitting on
a terrace, where he has set up a temporary office, and the post has arrived
– an erratic event in these parts. Dalrymple, 42, seizes the letters like a
birthday child.
The family’s pet cockatoo mutters on a perch beside him, climbing up and down
the ladder to defend its territory against the three cockerels that scrabble
around in the scattered feed beneath. A goat has mounted the hedge lining
the steps that lead down from the terrace and is munching noisily as its
tethered mother bleats for it to return.
This bucolic scene is an 80-minute drive down rutted lanes from the fabulous
chaos and clutter of Old Delhi, a city that has been the backdrop for many
of Dalrymple’s books – the most recent of which, The Last Mughal, a
prizewinning account of the Indian uprising of 1857, and the fall of the
Mughal dynasty, has sold more than 100,000 copies worldwide since it was
published two years ago. India has also provided inspiration for Olivia, 42,
who is on her way back from a family christening in Geneva. She is a
successful artist, painting beautifully detailed miniatures and depictions
of local life.
“This is not a smart area, in that nobody knows about it,” says Dalrymple, who
wrote his first book, In Xanadu, at 22. Their four-bedroom rented house may
be somewhat brutalist in appearance, but it is hardly a dump; the
neighbouring houses are equally large, with imposing walls and high, closed
gates to protect against snoopers.
The house was built for the family that runs the grand Imperial hotel in New
Delhi, but they never moved in. As Dalrymple’s landlords, however, they
provide six gardeners and a couple of guards, as many of the vegetables
grown on the plot go to the kitchens at the hotel – one of the stipulations
in this formerly agricultural district is that the land is used for farming.
“There are many belts of farmhouses in Delhi,” Dalrymple says. “In some,
though not in this case, the agricultural land has been built over and they
are now large square villas and not remotely farms. Once a year, a tax
inspector comes round and an envelope is passed. He ticks that millet and
corn are being grown, and that five buffaloes are wallowing in the village
pond.”
Among the piles of literary magazines, invitations and CDs from Amazon that
have arrived in the post, the heathery charms of the Glenalmond Tweed
Company catalogue catch the eye. Cold weather and tweeds are part of
Dalrymple’s heritage – he was brought up in East Lothian before battling the
Fen winds in Cambridge and moving to London to work as a journalist and
author.
India, too, has been sewn into the fabric of his life since he first visited
Old Delhi, to work for Mother Teresa in his gap year before going to
Cambridge, where he read history. “My life cleaves around that date, January
26, 1984,” he says. “The first part was orientated towards medieval history,
bicycling round churches and going to school [Ampleforth], loving plainchant
and Rievaulx Abbey, things like that.
“The second part of my life has been India, the Islamic world and the
inter-face between Islam and Christianity.” Dalrymple is working on a book
about pilgrimages and popular religion: “Last week, I went to an amazing
festival in Kerala, where the goddess Kali gets on her elephant and goes to
visit her sister the Virgin Mary.”
This is the writer’s third stint in India. He and Olivia had a flat in central
Delhi in the late 1980s, which they left in 1994 – the year his second book,
City of Djinns, for which he won the Sunday Times Young British Writer of
the Year award, appeared. In 2004, with another book, White Mughals – the
story of a late-18th-century love affair between an English army officer and
an Indian princess – under his belt, he and Olivia returned to Delhi. They
have been at the Jaunapur house for the past couple of years. Despite the
swimming pool and wide, if parched, lawns, it is officially a “farmhouse” –
and, with their menagerie of animals, the family seems to be doing its best
to keep it so.
The couple found the house through contacts – getting things done in India is
very much about knowing the right people. “You hear about the names of
agents through friends. Nobody seems to have an office; rents are infinitely
negotiable and variable, according to your perceived state of income.” Being
a writer, rather than, say, a banker, may have worked in Dalrymple’s favour,
as he pays rather less than the £3,000-£4,500 a month that is the going rate
for the area.
Because of India’s booming economy, the cost of living has risen considerably
since their previous timein the centre of Delhi.“When we started living
here, the weekly rental from our tiny terraced house in W6 wouldget us two
months in a one-bedroom flat in Delhi,” Dalrymple recalls. “By the time we
arrived back here, in 2004, a week’s rental from our much larger house in
Chiswick would get us two weeks at the farm. Now it is heading for parity,
and I can easily imagine, in the near future, that our London rent will not
cover a decent pad in Delhi, because of the sheer number of expats who have
moved in.”
The couple’s children – Ibby, 13, Sam, 11, and Adam, 8 – all attend the
British School in Delhi, which has itself burgeoned, due largely to the
influx of the offspring of employees of Cairn Energy, the Scottish oil and
gas firm. “When we first came, in the late 1980s, there were virtually no
expats,” Dalrymple says. “There cannot have been a period of history since
Vasco da Gama when there were fewer foreigners in India; I doubt if there
were more than 20 Englishmen living outside the High Commission.”
In the cool of the house is a large, book-lined study, and there are several
shady terraces, which the family uses at different times of the year. “We do
one month of really intensive white heat here in May,” Dalrymple says. “All
social life stops, and the sort of people who would go off to Simla now go
to their flats in Kensington or Broadway.
“This is when I catch up with the post, all the e-mails that have piled up,
and the family gets more attention. We sit inside under the air conditioning
[a generator kicks in during the frequent power cuts], and swim in the
evening. It is like being in London in August.”
By June, the heat is unbearable (40C), so the family decamps for 10 weeks or
so to the Chiswick house – which is rented out for the rest of the year. In
order not to compromise their nonresident status as far as the British tax
authorities are concerned, they spend less than 90 days back home: “You end
up taking family holidays in Ireland.”
After what Dalrymple admits is an “Edwardian” way of life in Delhi, with a
cook, an ayah and two houseboys, returning to Chiswick and cycling to the
local Sainsbury’s to buy groceries provides an abrupt reintroduction to the
21st century. “It always amazes me how easy it is to move from a world in
which you have your beds made, and where your morning chore is to flick
through a cookbook and decide what you are going to have for lunch, to
reheating something out of the foil or buying fresh fish from the
fishmonger, which you don’t have here,” he says. “The transition is always
pretty effortless. It is like having two different boxes – you move from one
to the other.”
Though the frustrations of living in India can be considerable – from power
cuts and bureaucracy to the apparent need for five men to carry out tasks
that in Britain would require just one – Dalrymple has no regrets. “There is
no question that it was the right thing personally, the right thing
career-wise,” he says.
The houseboys, Prem and Papu, arrive with lunch, including garlicky hors
d’oeuvres, hot from the new Amazon-delivered Moro cookbook and prepared by
Stanley, the Tamil Catholic cook turned fiery pastor in the Alpha &
Omega Baptist church. “I have no urge to leave,” Dalrymple says, tucking
in as he tells me Stanley’s story. “It’s just a more exciting life.”
An easy passage
- To buy property in India, you must have lived in the country for more than
182 days in the previous financial year on a nontourist visa. Don’t despair
if you don’t qualify: you can register a company in India and buy the
property through that.
- No such restrictions apply to nonresident Indians (NRIs) or people of Indian
origin (PIOs). Some states, including Himachal Pradesh, in northern India,
have imposed additional restrictions, although many of these are being
eased. One way round all this is to take a lease of between 10 and 20 years.
- India’s economy is booming and multinational companies are moving in,
pushing up property prices. Mumbai and New Delhi now have some of the most
expensive residential property in the world. Expect to pay a premium for
Lutyens-designed bungalows and historic villas on leafy estates, which come
with armies of malis (gardeners) and chowkidars (security guards), in the
Delhi suburbs.
- All new building development in Delhi is on the outskirts, known as the NCR,
or national capital region, where high-rise towers are springing up
overnight.
- Several estate agents cater to the expat market. Axiom Estates (0845 355
1188, www.axiomestates.com) has
off-plan apartments in the NCR from about £25,000. And Hamptons (020 7758
8447, www.hamptons-international.com)
is marketing properties in Gurgaon, a new town just outside Delhi, where
prices start at £125,000 for a three-bedroom flat and £400,000 for a
detached villa.
- Away from the cities, there is no local property market. The only way to
find houses is by word of mouth. Always employ an independent,
English-speaking solicitor.
- All foreign residents need to register with the government. Useful websites
include the High Commission of India in London (www.hcilondon.net/
visa), the Indian Embassy in London (www.hcilondon.org)
and the British Embassy in India (www.britishhighcommission.gov.uk/india).
Helen Davies
